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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Uh, living in a SFH with good public schools in a Tier 1 city is a luxury good. What's so hard to understand about that? Heck, owning in a SFH in a Tier 1 city is a luxury good in most areas.[/quote]

This. Its a problem everywhere. [/quote]

Why is this problem? What right does someone have to live in a walk up on the upper east side? Or a SFH in Beverly Hills? Or a SFH in Palo Alto or San Francisco? Or a SFH or equivalent in London or Paris? The sense of entitlement here is pretty amazing. [/quote]

Because cities should be attractive places for people to live. All people, not just ultra wealthy people. [/quote]

Many cities have attractive places for people live from the poorest to the ultra wealthy. There are people who think they should have the same housing location as the ultra wealthy.[/quote]

Ok, but many of us do NOT want the same housing location as the ultra wealthy. I want to live in a condo or small duplex/row house that is convenient to public transportation and is family friendly. I am fine with small homes. Fine with apartments. But I'd like something that doesn't make me car dependent (this is just yet another expense) and where I have some access to public green space like parks and playgrounds (since I don't expect a house with a hard, having some kind of common green space is important). I do not need a bunch of high price restaurants and bars nearby, but having some amenities like a decent grocery store and pharmacy, a library, a few places to eat or drink, and a school within walking, biking, or a short bus ride away would be great.

Like basically I want to live like a middle class European person in a city. I don't need the best schools in the city, I don't need lots of high end dining and retail, I don't expect a huge house our a yard or a garage. I'd like to live somewhere that allows me to walk or take public transportation most of the time, and where I can comfortably have a child or maybe two.

This is unbelievably hard to find in DC. We have sort of found it (we live in a 2 bedroom condo) but the surrounding neighborhood is kind of split between super upscale gentrification (essentially pricing us out of a lot of the businesses near our home because they are geared at people who are making 250k+ and we don't, plus we already had to stretch a bit to buy our condo) and also just poverty.

We'd move to the suburbs (I have nothing against suburbs and don't need the "cool" cache of the city at all, I could care less) but most suburbs would require us to have not only one but two cars and have insufficient connectivity via public transportation. And the suburbs that come closest to this are often as expensive, if not more so, than where we currently live. With the added cost of another vehicle and the fact that most suburbs would force us into more square footage (making the cost savings of being further out a bit of a wash because we'd just wind up spending the same amount, but on a bigger house with a yard because it's hard to find 1000 sq ft condos in the burbs that are family friendly).

Like I'm just really tired of the claim that everyone wants a giant, expensive house in the "best" part of town. I don't. What I actually do want is scalable and would serve the needs of an enormous number of families in this city, especially people making somewhere between 60k and 150k. But instead we keep just building housing for wealthy people and then telling middle class families "move further out" which just increases or transportation costs and decreases our quality of life.

Build a city for middle class people. Rich people will carve out niches for themselves in very desirable areas, which is fine. The city will need to find ways to support, house, and help people in poverty. But if you build a city for middle class folks, you get a city of teachers, construction workers, mid-level managers, young professionals, fire fighters, small business owners, etc. What a great place to live! Imagine how great that would be.[/quote]

There’s been a few threads touching on this recently, but the root of your problem is that the vast majority of the country has been built over the past 80-100 years to prioritize car ownership. And to avoid owning a car (or to at least be “car light”) you need money to afford. OR you have to be too poor to afford a car and willing to live near lots of bus lines (often in areas with higher crimes and poorer performing schools). Bailey’s Crossroads/Culmore comes to mind as one of those neighborhoods. Otherwise if you’re a MC person you need to get on board with how the generations before us decided we should all live.

My boomer parents cannot fathom why anyone would not be willing to commute “just a little bit farther” to have a new house. They do not understand why the “open road” is not appealing. I mean, you can have the comfort of your own car and not have to deal with public transportation or walking! That is a feature of urban planning over the past decades, not a bug.

And I hate it. I hate that it now costs too much money to tear up and redevelop what has already been built, so instead we have to do infill around places like Tyson’s, which will always be lipstick on a car dependent pig. It’s why the US by and large will never be as charming as the small towns in Europe you would love to live in.[/quote]

This, exactly. We are living with the consequences of choices made 50-70 years ago. This is why so many younger people are just over it and choosing not to marry or have kids. The infrastructure of society makes it so hard to have a family in this country without buying into a bunch of systems that kind of suck. And if you say "hey, this system kind of sucks, what if we did something else," you get called entitled and stupid.

Even if a whole group of you says "hey, we don't like this system, we don't want to be car dependent, we don't want to live in huge houses on huge lots, we don't want to spend 2 hours a day commuting, we don't want to live so far from our neighbors, we don't want to maintain these giant lawns, etc. And we don't want to have to have two parents working demanding jobs in order to afford our big house on the big lot and the two cars required to make that functional. We want to scale the whole thing way down, live in smaller homes that are walkable and connected to public transportation, and then also have jobs that are less demanding and offer more balance." Older generations are like "that's a pipe dream, shut up, we figured out the best way to do this, how dare you challenge it."

Boomers/Gen X fashioned the world into an image they wanted, and now when we try to do the same, the boomers yell at us and call us selfish. Yet their vision of the country is going to collapse under its own weight eventually anyway, because you can't have a culture premised on dual-working parents and multiple cars and giant homes without creating a whole host of negative externalities (pollution, climate change, mental health issues, family dysfunction) that will eventually break everything apart.

Anyway, we can't have bike lanes or multi-family housing because it will make the car commute of someone living in a 4000 sq ft house in Rockville too long I guess.[/quote]

1. I don't think you're selfish. More like a utopian. "If only we could wave a magic wand and change everything about the world and the last 200 years of history, everything would be perfect." That's not the way the human experience has worked at any point in recorded history.

2. That said, you can absolutely have everything you want. But YOU need to make it happen, not rely on "society" to come along and make it happen for you. Go ahead and scale down. I'm Gen X and I started my own remote business with less than $5K in capital 10 years ago. I'll never be rich, but I have a flexible schedule, make a decent living, and it's allowed me and my family to live in a LCOL area, in a walkable neighborhood, with great access to outdoor activities and great work/life balance. It's right there in front of you, but you need to figure out how to go get it.

[/quote]

I suspect the percentage of people in their 40s who actually want such a lifestyle over a traditional suburban one is in the single digits. There’s a reason the vast majority of Americans live in the suburbs [/quote]

The vast majority of Americans live in car dependent suburbs because that is what is available and it’s not like the average Joe just trying to manage their 40+ hour week/job and raise a couple kids has time to lobby city hall to change zoning ordinances and re-do the local urban planning. Most people are too tired and lack resources to do anything other than accept their built environment.

[b]But if you asked people if they would like to have a coffee shop, grocery store, pediatrician’s office, daycares, etc. in a pleasant walking distance of their house, most would say yes.[/b] However, our zoning often separates residential from retail, and many neighborhoods do not have sidewalks and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure to get to these places even if they’re technically walking distance. Not to mention, how unpleasant is it to walk to a shopping center swimming in a giant sea of concrete because we prioritized land for parking lots. Literally everything has been built under the assumption people will drive. Also, infilling public transportation is difficult because you’re looking at tearing up highway lanes, eminent domain, etc. so what can be offered in most places is going to be too infrequent and inconvenient to entice people out of their cars, even those who may otherwise like an option other than driving.

Allowing the automobile industry to steam roll the development of this country has been a disaster. Drive through somewhere like Breezewood PA or the random towns outside of third tier cities full of half-boarded up strip malls, chain restaurants, and 4-6 lane roads to get anywhere and tell me we haven’t made large swathes of this country absolutely hideous. [/quote]

Ah but that's not the complete question, is it? To have that accessible to a fair number of people and not just immediate neighbors, you'd have to replace SFH communities with townhouses or condo buildings, because that type of accessible walkability can exist only amid density.

So the real question is, "would you like to have a coffee shop, grocery store, doctor's office and daycare in a pleasant walking distance, in exchange for which you must live in a smaller townhouse or an apartment?" [/quote]

Yes, I would as long as the apartment/townhouse is built with appropriate light and insulation. 
In my current home, we can walk to schooling (daycare, elementary, middle and HS) but cant walk to stores ([b]reasonable which I define as less than 20-25 minutes one way[/b]). 
It would also require that stores and offices have a smaller footprint as well plus housing within walking or bus distance for employees. [/quote]

That’s what we want.

To carry 4 bags of groceries 25 minutes.  :roll:

PP you are in the minority here. You might want it but 99% want to live a regular life. There’s no conspiracy here, just the facts of life.[/quote]

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